Re: for the drinking age types

Posted 08 June 2012 - 08:39 AM

Lol. Yeah. Some places do make their own beer which are great, but none are close to where I live. So I usually go with buds Few pubs like the Manchester United have lotsa brands but those places are too costly for me at the mo.

@Wolf In India, usually when people say 'beer', they mean Kingfisher which is an Indian brand owned by Vijay Mallya ,the owner of the F1 team Force India.. Kingfisher tastes like donkey piss.

Re: for the drinking age types

Posted 08 June 2012 - 08:41 AM

Yeah... Bud. Um...

Budweiser is not beer. It is swill that they gave to desperate Americans during WWII rationing and then figured out people would buy the cheap crap even when they weren't starving to death. Fucking rice in beer. It is a sad and shameful thing.

I probably have a Bud every few years or so at some party, just to remind myself how dreadfully vile it is. I can't finish it. I'm trying to think of a less appealing beer and failing.

Re: for the drinking age types

Posted 08 June 2012 - 08:53 AM

baavgai, on 08 June 2012 - 10:41 AM, said:

Fucking rice in beer. It is a sad and shameful thing.

Rice is a perfectly respectable grain for beer, as long as you're not concerned about the Reinheitsgebot, which since I'm not in Bavaria I don't.
The problem isn't the rice, it's the Budweiser - which isn't even Budweiser since it's got nothing to do with the real local beer of Budweis. What AndHowsYerCunt, Inc, has done is very much like me starting a distillery here in Boston, naming it "Islay", and then suing Laphroaig for IP violations.

Re: for the drinking age types

Posted 08 June 2012 - 09:31 AM

I know I said this in another forum, but I toured the Budweiser brewery in St Louis this spring and was pleasantly surprised by the Shock Top brand. The Belgian White was good, the Lemon Shandy is nice for a hot day outside, and the regular Budweiser was much better (relatively) than it is from the bar or store. However, it's still swill out here, and the Shock Top Belgian White is all carbonation and no flavor from the bottle. The Lemon Shandy is still nice, although I don't care for any of the other varieties from the brand.

Re: for the drinking age types

Posted 08 June 2012 - 10:39 AM

jon.kiparsky, on 08 June 2012 - 11:53 AM, said:

Rice is a perfectly respectable grain for beer, as long as you're not concerned about the Reinheitsgebot

I'm not sure it was ever respectable. I guess it depends on what you consider beer. It's a pretty wide umbrella, so I'm sure you can find rice in there somewhere. Ultimately, all the grains are there to give sugar to the happy little yeast. Some grains just add more to the mix. You might as well use potatoes or corn syrup if you want rice.

Reinheitsgebot? Heh. By those laws, actually adding yeast is not permitted. You just leave open your vat and hope you catch the right microbe. Brewers beholden to such restrictions actually did set up a clean room kind of affair, to ensure consistent airborne inoculation.

Re: for the drinking age types

Posted 08 June 2012 - 10:51 AM

Open fermentation is also a pretty standard practice - most of your better belgians are open fermented. (As are their beers).

As for rice, a lot of microbrewers will use it when they want to try something a little odd in a summer beer. I've had a fair few of these experiments, and it's fine. Old Lompoc had one of the better ones, as I recall. You don't usually find it in bottles, or when you do it'll be a special one-off deal, but if you go to a good bar (like the Horse Brass, in Portland) you'll get a chance to try an ale with some rice in the grain bill at some point.

What's not so fine is the Busch method, which as I understand is a three step process:

Re: for the drinking age types

Posted 08 June 2012 - 10:59 AM

jon.kiparsky, on 08 June 2012 - 01:51 PM, said:

Bud isn't beer, not because it includes rice, but because it's not actually made the way you make beer.

Agreed. I wasn't saying it was buggered because of the rice. Rather, it's just one of the signs they went off the beer track a long time ago. I've actually had "budweiser" style beer, from Poland, that didn't suck. I assume it's reasonably close to the original Czech stuff.

I didn't realize it was as ugly as you describe, but I'm not particularly surprised.

Re: for the drinking age types

Posted 08 June 2012 - 11:13 AM

I haven't actually witnessed it, so it's unreliable. But having tasted the stuff, I believe it.

And from an industrial standpoint, it makes sense. Let the stuff sit around for a month before you can sell it? Screw that! You can whip up a batch of this stuff in an hour, and Americans don't know the difference, right?

Quote

I've actually had "budweiser" style beer, from Poland, that didn't suck. I assume it's reasonably close to the original Czech stuff.

I've been told that Czechvar is the closest to what would have been the original Budweiser. There's a lot of good Czech beers, and I'm sure the Poles have come up with a number of good ones as well.

Given that Czechoslovakia is one of the two big hop regions, it's not surprising that there's a lot of good beer in that neck of the woods. Hell, even the Germans can make a good one from time to time. The thing I love about the beers from around there is the variety. Here, we pretty much talk about color and alcohol content, and if you distinguish a bitter from a pale you're in "beer snob" territory. That's the English heritage, I think. On the Continent, all over the place, you have more styles of beer than you could know what to do with, and each of them is its own thing. Hell, I think in Belgium there's more varieties of beer than there are people.

Re: for the drinking age types

Bah.. it's beer by the common man's definition. If told to pick up beer for a party it's miller, bud, or busch.

You insult the common man. He can have taste buds, too.

If I'm bringing beer to a party, it's not swill I'd be embarrassed to be seen with. Surprisingly, crap like Bud isn't actually that cheap. You can usually get something like Yuengling in these parts for less. Sam Adam's is easy enough to find. Have some pride, man!

If the host asks for swill, I'll bring it and a six of something that doesn't suck.

If the goal is the get hammered, you might just as well go for vodka and call it a night.